Biohazard Cleanup Near Hyde Park Augusta, GA

Augusta was established in 1736 by James Oglethorpe, founder of the Georgia colony, as a trading and military post at a natural crossing of the Savannah River on the Fall Line.

The city was named for Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, the wife of Frederick, Prince of Wales and the mother of King George III.

Augusta served as Georgia's state capital from 1785 to 1795, the second city to hold that role in the state's history.

On January 1, 1996, the city of Augusta and Richmond County merged into a single consolidated city-county government.

The 2020 census counted 202,081 residents in Augusta, making it Georgia's third-most populous city, and Census Bureau QuickFacts counted about 75,222 households in the city in its 2020-2024 survey figures.

Augusta is known worldwide as the home of the Masters Tournament, played each spring at Augusta National Golf Club, which Bobby Jones and Clifford Roberts founded in 1933; the first Masters was held in 1934 and the tournament draws more than 200,000 visitors to the city each spring.

The Medical College of Georgia was chartered in Augusta in 1828 as the Medical Academy of Georgia, making it Georgia's oldest medical school and one of the oldest continuously operating medical schools in the United States.

Augusta University was officially formed on January 8, 2013, by consolidating Augusta State University with Georgia Health Sciences University, the later home of the Medical College of Georgia.

Augusta's higher-education roots reach back to the Academy of Richmond County, founded in 1783 as a high school and a forerunner of today's Augusta University, and the city is also home to Paine College, a historically Black liberal arts college.

During the Civil War, Augusta housed the Confederate Powder Works, the principal gunpowder factory of the Confederacy, whose towering chimney still stands along the Augusta Canal, which was completed in 1847 to power the city's textile mills.